Greg Sargent points out that the new poll on the TSA procedures also shows most Americans don't support racial profiling. Fifty-nine percent oppose profiling based on race and religion, while somewhat alarmingly 55 percent support profiling based on nationality. Sargent comments:
Glenn Greenwald and Eugene Robinson are understandably upset about the uproar over the TSA pat-downs, because they think people are only angry over these policies now that they are being targeted. If the policies were only directed at Arabs and Muslims, Greenwald and Robinson suggest, people would be just fine with them.
As Greenwald puts it, people are "angry that, this time, it's being directed at them -- rather than those dark, exotic, foreign-seeming Muslims who deserve it."
Well, not according to the internals of the new Washington Post poll on the TSA patdowns. The whole uproar over this is deeply depressing on many levels, but perhaps here's one bright spot: While the public overwhelmingly supports profiling in general, majorities oppose profiling based on race and religion.
Many conservatives support, as Gene Healy put it, "giving the freedom fondle to anyone vaguely swarthy." It's good news that the American people aren't with them. But the question is whether those oppose the new procedures support racial profiling, not whether a majority of people do. Anyone who actually supports racial profiling but finds the TSA's procedures invasive just thinks the TSA is being too egalitarian about violating people's civil liberties. It bears repeating that racial profiling isn't any more effective than random screening and that terrorists aren't too dumb to circumvent a profiling regime by simply picking terrorists who don't fit the profile.
Even if most Americans don't support racial profiling, we are still, as Healy writes, living in a world crafted by those who have been so successful in getting Americans to compromise their freedoms in the past.
